We've spied the production intent BMW i3 interior clearly for the first time. Although it's still in unfinished pre-production form, we can see some major components and design elements that will come on the production i3 when the first are delivered in late 2013.

The dash and console loses much of the futuristic styled full touch-sensitive and buttonless interior of the i3 concept in favor of a more practical and modern-day style BMW dashboard. It does however retain an LCD instrument screen from the concept. The large navigation / iDrive screen can be seen in the upper center console, still shrouded by the cloth covering. The plastic around the steering column will of course be gone by production and the rest of the lower center console added. The steering wheel in the prototype is borrowed from a current 3 series, but the production i3 may get a unique steering wheel (with special badging at the very least).

With its fully electric powertrain, the i3 will be BMW's first mass produced zero emissions car. It's also expected to be the volume production vehicle to market featuring a carbon fiber reinforced plastic internal structure and body. The i3 will provide a good preview of how BMW will reduce vehicle weight in the future through increasing use of CFRP in its vehicles.

The i3 will feature four doors and seating for four occupants with dimensions being slightly larger than the MINI Cooper and BMW 1 Series but smaller than the BMW 3 Series. It will be powered by a newly developed powertrain consisting of a 134 horsepower electric motor running on lithium-ion batteries and driving the rear axle. BMW is aiming to achieve a 160 km (100 mi) range, the same expected for the BMW ActiveE, but in order to reduce weight with a battery capacity of 16 kWh instead of the ActiveE's 30 kWh. A range extended version that functions similarly to the Chevrolet Volt is also being considered by BMW.

The prototype presented at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show has a 22 kWh lithium-ion battery pack that is expected to deliver between 130 to 160 km (80 to 100 miles) and the battery will take about four hours to fully charge from the 240-volt charging unit. The i3 is expected to go from 0 to 100 km/h (0 to 60 mph) in less than 8 seconds and 0 to 60 km/h in less than 4 seconds. The top speed will be limited to 150 km/h (93 mph) [See the i3 Concept Full Specs].

Pricing for the i3 has been speculated to start in the 35000-40000 euros range.

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For an around-town only car, it seems both expensive and unattractive. Hell, they got rid of the very thing that made the car cool: the futuristic interior. Here I was ready to almost be George Jetson. Not now; there's no chance in hell I'd consider buying that ugly, boring thing now. The cache is gone and there's not nearly enough places to recharge the thing. I live in downtown DC and were I to drive 100 miles in any direction except north, I'd be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

It's an all electric/electronic car. Why does it need to look like a conventional car?

For an around-town only car, it seems both expensive and unattractive. Hell, they got rid of the very thing that made the car cool: the futuristic interior. Here I was ready to almost be George Jetson. Not now; there's no chance in hell I'd consider buying that ugly, boring thing now. The cache is gone and there's not nearly enough places to recharge the thing. I live in downtown DC and were I to drive 100 miles in any direction except north, I'd be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

It's an all electric/electronic car. Why does it need to look like a conventional car?

we still dont know what detailing and styling it will take on the outside and any futuristic lines and alloys. inside could still yet be upgraded to become more futuristic. already that screen looks quite large which can be cool.

i live in london UK and places to charge your car electronically are slowly getting better, but still scattered around sparsely. i wouldve thought the US would've been far ahead us on this count....

we still dont know what detailing and styling it will take on the outside and any futuristic lines and alloys. inside could still yet be upgraded to become more futuristic. already that screen looks quite large which can be cool.

i live in london UK and places to charge your car electronically are slowly getting better, but still scattered around sparsely. i wouldve thought the US would've been far ahead us on this count....

Well, I realize they could add some lines and whatnot to the thing, but that goofy general shape I see under the camo isn't boding well for the thing to ever look good.

The US ahead of the UK, or any other place in Northern Europe or Japan? Not even close. The extent to which simple, life improving technology is in place here is appalling. Everywhere I went in Tokyo, there was a toilet seat that automatically lifted when I approached and then washed my ass (there are also nozzles for female anatomy) when I was done with my business. What good is that? Less paper needed; greatly reduced exposure to germs; more sexual spontaneity (or at least for me -- those nether areas don't always smell or taste so good ), which makes for happier people in general. Isn't that enough from something as straight forward as applying technology to human hygiene?

Consider something as basic as access to the internet. You should have heard the uproar when one small town proposed to provide free, public internet access throughout the town. Yet, the fact is that internet access should pretty much be everywhere are free, just as are most roads. It has reached the level of importance to the nation, the world, that not having it puts one at a disadvantage on many levels. IMO, land line T1 speed internet access should be free and available to everyone and every place and mid-grade fiber optic speeds should be freely available wirelessly, ubiquitously in all cities. After all, the internet now does what roads used to; it takes you and your ideas places, albeit virtually. If you want to pay for something faster than that, fine.

The extent to which technology has been adopted by the masses in this country is well behind most other G20 countries. And when it comes to transporting people from place to place, we are far behind the curve. You can't shop with your phone here, and we don't have one single high speed train like the TGV, to say nothing of maglev trains. Trains are almost unheard of outside the DC to Boston corridor. Most cities don't have a subway system and when you land at an airport in most US cities, there's no express train -- a la Heathrow -- or even semi-quick train -- a la Gatwick -- that'll take you straight downtown in 15 minutes.

Think of this: I have a client in central London. I catch an evening flight out of Dulles, land at Gatwick at 7 a.m., get on the Thames Link to Black Friars, walk across the street, stop in the cafeteria and grab a coffee, go upstairs and be seated 5 minutes before my 8 a.m. meeting. There might be two cities in the US where an international traveler can do that -- Atlanta or Chicago -- but I wouldn't put money on it.

Anything involving transportation that doesn't also involve the combustion engine here in the US years behind the rest of the developed world.

Example Two: Every one of my clients is a Fortune 500 corporation that does business globally. Most have yet to transform their enterprises so as to fully automate the expenditure cycle of their operations.

Example Three: Despite the fact that one can watch live porn in real-time high definition feeds on the internet, only one of my clients executed their project using video conferencing. Instead, they were willing to spend in excess of $40K/month for consultants to travel to their facility every week. The projects are typically one to three years long. For the cost of three months of travel, they could have installed video conferencing capability at the desk of every one of their project team members. (It'd be even less if they would just use the camera on their employees' laptops.) Nearly all already have at least one conference room with that capability, but they don't use it.

No, corporate America is not remotely close to being ready to adopt or encourage cutting edge approaches, and corporate America is what funds politics, so governments aren't jumping up and down saying it has to be done. Why? Because the organizations that are at the forefront of the new approaches/technologies are not owned by the huge conglomerates and these new ways of getting things done could spell the demise of those entities. The existing corporate giants aren't nimble enough to shift rapidly, and they've mostly just come off of 20 years of investing in doing it the old way, only better and more cheaply; they want their ROI from having done so. To retool for a new paradigm would make those investments become sunk costs.

And it's not just transportation that's behind. Health care delivery is also behind the curve as goes technology. Think about it. When you go to see a doctor for routine care, what percentage of those times does s/he do that you couldn't do yourself and discuss via a video conference? Can't you not draw your own blood, put it in a vial, mail it off to a lab and have the results sent to the doctor? You can measure your own blood pressure.

A doctor friend of mine once told me that until you get to performing invasive tests, evaluating the potentiality of a public health risk, or performing surgery, there's little a doctor can do that you can't do yourself, and in most routine visits, it's you who tells the doctor what's wrong and not the other way round. We need doctors for their analytic abilities, not to perform routine look sees, though we do need them to analyze, not gather, the information obtained from a routine look see. (Sure, it's a bit different with a specialist.)

Is it not obvious to you that if you have a chronic or really bad, persistent cough that you need several things done: throat culture, chest x-ray, and blood test. So go to a lab, get that stuff done have the results sent to a doctor and have the doc call you inform you of the next steps. Did you really need a doctor to tell you to go do that? All I'm saying is that a lot of the initial steps to delivering medical care involve folks that need not be involved at that point, thus making the whole process cost more. Now if you can hardly breathe, walk and talk with your cough, you should go straight to the hospital, but then that's not what I'm saying should be different. If blood starts oozing out your eyeballs, elbows and ass, you should go straight to the hospital, but again, you would do that now, and you'd be seen immediately by a swarm of doctors wearing hazmat gear, and every place you've been in the past month would likely be put on quarantine. LOL

Why do I have to go to the DMV to renew a driver's license? I can renew a passport and obtain a birth certificate entirely via the mail, so if I want to be someone other than myself when I go there, I can. Sure, they can test my vision and stipulate that I must wear glasses. They can't make me wear them, so what's the point? In short, there's almost no reason for people to go to a DMV facility. So there's a ton of money that can be saved just by getting rid of the buildings and land. You need one DMV facility per state.

It should not bear the BMW badge. It's crazy because I just got finished watching CNBC's documentary on BMW, and they showed how awesome the i3 concept car looked. Then I come onto bimmerpost and the first thing I see is this. What a shame.